Should Phillies try to trade for Tigers pitcher Matthew Boyd? | David Murphy

Whatever the Phillies decide on Matthew Boyd, they’ve seen him from every possible angle, including up close and personal, as general manager Matt Klentak was among a contingent of evaluators on hand to see the 28-year-old Tigers lefty on the mound at Comerica Park on Tuesday night.

What they saw was pretty much par for the course for Boyd’s breakout 2019 season, in terms of the good (he struck out 31 percent of the batters he faced), the bad (he allowed a cross-country, two-run home run to the light-hitting Roman Quinn), and the unknown (we’ll get to that).

Boyd isn’t the only option the Phillies will consider between now and the July 31 trade deadline, but he might be the only impact player who makes sense to acquire, given their long odds in the division race and their pressing need to maximize the expected future value they receive in any deal that requires them to part with a significant asset.

Boyd still has one more scheduled start before the trade deadline, and it wouldn’t make much sense for the Phillies to sign off on a deal before he throws a bullpen session and signals that he came out of Tuesday night’s start fully healthy. But the time for making decisions is drawing near, so let’s consider some of the pertinent questions that the Phillies front office will be batting around in the coming days.

First, because he almost certainly would make them better for the rest of this season, and, assuming good health, he would continue to do so through the 2022 season, which is the last before he is eligible for free agency.

Both parts of that are significant, but especially the second one, given the dearth of pitching prospects that the Phillies have in the upper levels of the minors.

Adonis Medina is the only Top 100 pitching prospect that the organization has in double A or triple A. And while he may have a higher upside than Boyd, he is also a bigger question, which we’ve seen firsthand in the cases of young pitchers such as Jake Thompson, Vince Velasquez, and others.

Given the way 2019 has unfolded, the outlook for 2020 and beyond is stark. Last year, it was Jake Arrieta’s knee. This year, it is his elbow. There’s a reason that nobody was willing to top the Phillies’ three-year, $60 million offer last spring. He’s a 33-year-old pitcher who has been on the decline for three seasons now.

The Phillies put a lot of faith in Nick Pivetta. They held out hope for Velasquez. Now, faith and hope are gone. Even if the Phillies anticipate spending big money on one of the intriguing crop of free- agent starters available this offseason, they would still project to be a couple of arms short of a playoff-caliber rotation.

Given the economics of the sport, it is almost necessary that one of those arms be a cost-controlled player. Boyd is making $2.6 million this season with three years of arbitration remaining.

The two other prominent trade targets who are under club control beyond 2019 -- Arizona’s Robbie Ray and Texas’ Mike Minor -- will be entering their walk years, and at much higher dollar figures.

The guy we saw on the mound Tuesday night certainly isn’t a top-of-the-rotation arm. He relies heavily on his slider to generate swings and misses, many of them out of the zone. (According to FanGraphs, his chase rate this season is 34.6 percent, while the major league average is 31.4 percent.)

Against the Phillies, he essentially threw two pitches, with more sliders than fastballs. He relies a lot on deception and features a slow, sweeping arm action that seemed to keep the Phillies off balance all night.

It’s hard to consider a pitcher an ace without a plus fastball, and Boyd does not have one. His average velocity this season is 91.7 mph , according to FanGraphs, which leads us to the most interesting part of Boyd’s outing Tuesday. Throughout his six innings of work, Boyd’s heater consistently sat at 92-94 and touched 95.

In fact, according to BrooksBaseball.net, his fastball has averaged 93 mph during July, the highest of any month over the last two seasons and the continuation of what has been a linear progression in 2019: 91.3 in April, 92.6 in May, 92.8 in June, and 93.04 in July.

His ability to change elevations with the pitch and locate it at the upper end of the zone amplified the pitch’s effectiveness against the Phillies: He generated swings-and-misses on 17 percent of the fastballs he threw, up from a season average of 9 percent. Then again, the Phillies have struggled to hit fastballs at times this season.

Quinn’s mammoth two-run home run off Boyd was a good example of the pitcher’s biggest weakness, and one of the biggest causes for concern. He allows a ton of home runs, 1.7 per nine innings, a rate that is eighth highest among qualified major-league starters. He does this while pitching his home games in a cavernous ballpark.

Detroit will almost certainly be looking for a package that will seem incommensurate with a 28-year-old starter who has never throw more than 171 innings in a season and has a 4.25 ERA over the last two years.

One previous trade to consider is the Cubs’ acquisition of Jose Quintana two summers ago, which required them to part with one of the best prospects in the game in Eloy Jimenez.

Unlike Boyd, Quintana had already logged four seasons of 200-plus innings and was regarded as a legitimate middle-of-the-rotation arm. Like Boyd, he came with three-and-a-half seasons of club control, which is a significant variable in this equation and represents the Tigers’ greatest leverage.

They are under no financial pressure to trade Boyd. The only reason his name is even on the market is the hope on Detroit’s part that it can land a no-doubt-about-it haul. The only real leverage a team like the Phillies has is Detroit’s fear that Boyd’s current level of performance is as high as it is ever going to get.

The problem the Phillies face is that their inventory of positional talent pales in comparison with what other teams might be able to offer without fear of jeopardizing their future. Take the Yankees, who recently sent down 24-year-old outfielder Clint Frazier despite his .843 OPS and 11 home runs. They also have a well-regarded 21-year-old outfield prospect in Estevan Florial. This, with Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge in the fold at the corners.

The Dodgers lineup is brimming with young talent, and they have three Top 100 position prospects at triple A.

At this point, the Phillies’ two biggest trade chips in that department, assuming Scott Kingery is untouchable, are third baseman Alec Bohm and, perhaps, center fielder Adam Haseley Given Bohm’s meteoric rise and his performance thus far at double-A Reading, they have the ammunition to make a big deal. But if Bohm is off the table, do they really have what it would take to put together an offer that would persuade the Tigers to part ways with Boyd?

I wouldn’t think so, unless we’re talking about a package that includes Detroit closer Shane Greene. Even then, the Phillies would be putting immense pressure on themselves to get it right.

Scouts all seem to agree that Bohm is going to hit. There are legitimate questions about whether he’ll be able to defend well enough to play third base long term, and the presence of Rhys Hoskins at first base removes that from the equation. But with the seemingly imminent arrival of the DH in the National League, defense isn’t as big a question as it would otherwise have been. Besides, there could be a better trade option than Boyd available this offseason.

The Phillies could attempt to flex their financial muscle and work out a deal in which they agree to take on a significant chunk of the $35 million or so remaining on dead-weight starter Jordan Zimmermann’s deal.

It’s difficult to imagine that Boyd would be enough to make any team willing to part with a hitter it projects as a big-league star within the next couple of seasons. Could the Phillies sell the Tigers on Haseley, plus cash, plus Nick Pivetta pitching in a spacious home ballpark?

As always, everything depends on how the Tigers’ talent evaluators grade the pieces the Phillies have to offer. This time of year, the odds are always against the big blockbuster move.

The Phillies have a lot of work to do before they can consider themselves legit contenders. Boyd would be a nice piece to add. But he is hardly a game-changer, at least at this point. And giving away more than they end up getting back could be disastrous.